CUDA was just not that big of a commitment of resources honestly for a gpu company. It also broke even relatively early in terms of making money because of oil and gas. Jensen personally threatened to axe the entire project multiple times when we nearly failed to meet certain contracts.
I have no insights into internals of Nvidia, but it really doesn’t make sense to me how there is literally no alternatives that are even close to its maturity. I remember in the early days OpenMP and PPL being contenders early on, but I never heard about them after and only CUDA kept going. I was working on a graduate project in 2009 and I remember us looking into OpenMP and CUDA and going with CUDA because we found it easier to use. But also along with CUDA, only Nvidia pushed the whole GPGPU idea and AMD (and Microsoft to some extent) only paid lip service to the concept without any actual commitment like Nvidia did for a long time.
The search model is not the same model, and it's quite obviously worse when you use it, so that's not quite a reason I would personally find the hostility excessive.
I bought my box for $3k last year because I hadn't updated my PC since the first threadripper 1950x, and the Strix Halo is the only x86 with unified memory that's optimized for the kind of CPU intensive stuff I do, and they finally have proper AVX512 too. It was the perfect upgrade for me (except for lack of PCIe 5 & ECC), which coincidentally happened to be perfectly positioned for local inferrence.
and I liked it so much (and saw that the RAM drought was going to last for at least a few years) so I bought a second one to use as a general server for myself and my family.
This is a general point rather than an argument supporting the GP comment, but it can be shockingly hard to know what the correct response to particular situations is, or predict how a system will respond. For example, one system I know had difficulty differentiating people laying on the road from unmapped speedbumps (particularly at night), but was very good at recognizing them standing up. Someone spent a lot of time testing with dummies until perception improved. Another had no idea how to handle people in fursuits and halloween costumes, because it was incorrectly applying animal behavioral models to pedestrians.
That's why the latest self-driving systems include reasoning models that draw from the massive amount of knowledge embedded in LLMs. Language evolved to communicate things that are not here and now after all.
I also want to see the known abstraction skills of LLM used to properly recognize where the objective nature of C++ makes most sense in Kernel code. All the new interfaces, polymorphism.
Can confirm: In the 1970s our high school had a minicomputer for teaching programming, and it was turned off when not in use. After turning it on, we would enter the magic three binary instructions into memory using sixteen toggles on the front panel.
Give it six months and there'll be have Optimus robots toggling switches to load terrabytes of binary programs directly into memory. Nobody wrote it, nobody will read it, but it will run everything.
The point is that if we can put binary directly into RAM, then what is assembly if not a programming language? Assembly is source code in a programming language that is turned into binary by a compiler called an assembler.
If you don’t feel that toggling the binary 16-bit words into RAM demonstrates that binary is what actually runs on the hardware, and that assembly is source code for a binary, well ok. I find it persuasive.
> Russia has had this capability for years but have not used it.
Complete bullshit, Russia has been targeting civilian infrastructure from the very beginning. The only thing that changed is that Ukraine is now running out of advanced air defense, so that more of the attacks are getting through.
In this war hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of missiles and drones have been utilized. Defenses on both sides have done a generally good job of disabling them. But "disabling" them doesn't mean they disappear, it often just means that they fall and sometimes explode on impact with whatever they land on. That's going to result in tremendous damage to civilian facilities.
Both sides instead regularly frame it, for propaganda purposes, as being targeted without ever saying as such - 'A [enemy] [drone/missile] struck a beach full of civilians' for instance. That's completely accurate, but misleading because most people think that means the beach was targeted, as opposed to 'we shot down an incoming drone that was headed for a military base and it crashed into a beach'.
The reason things look so different now is because civilian facilities are being targeted. And this isn't just in Ukraine obviously, as per this topic. Ukraine has also had this capability to completely destroy civilian facilities for years. We're only getting these headlines, and likely many more to come as winter approaches, because this Pandora's Box has been opened.
While it is undeniable, that Ukraine has a propaganda as well, it does not have to cover up DELIBERATE targets of civilian infrastructure and then hitting them again when firefighters are arriving, just like Assad did in Syria.
Your comment doesn't really distinguish between DELIBERATE and COLLATERAL damages to civilians and their properties. I do not know what was in your other comments that were flagged, but Yandex data centers are LEGITIMATE TARGETS as they are linked to Kremlin businesses and works for them. So, they are not civilian facilities - same way as Alabuga college students that are assembling military drones - they are legal military targets, regardless of their age and not being in Army.
First off I completely agree with you in regards to double taps, which sometimes are even rather more than double. But I'd also observe that this is a standard part of modern war. Russia uses them, Ukraine uses them, the US constantly uses them. For instance when the Iranian school was hit, it was also double tapped. This a horrific strategy that should be a warcrime, but it's not. I also think it's self defeating, because it simply motivates the opposing forces to do the same, but it seems countries are okay with the deadly equilibrium that it creates.
Your logic about what is a valid military target is also dangerous, because if you squint hard enough then basically everything is a legitimate military target. Since this Pandora's Box has been opened Russia is unabashedly targeting all sorts of civilian infrastructure, even including food warehouses. And that food does indeed feed the military, but I think calling it a military target because of that would be disingenuous.
People are far too myopic and led by emotion instead of their brain. When Ukraine started destroying the Wildberries warehouses people cheered without ever asking themselves what it would do to the nature of the conflict. What we're seeing today was 100% predictable, and this will not end well for Ukraine or the people of Ukraine. I feel for them, and hope they can one day find themselves with a leader who does too.
And you obviously have show flagged on, or you wouldn't be able to reach this point in the discussion.
> Since this Pandora's Box has been opened Russia is unabashedly targeting all sorts of civilian infrastructure, even including food warehouses. And that food does indeed feed the military, but I think calling it a military target because of that would be disingenuous.
> People are far too myopic and led by emotion instead of their brain. When Ukraine started destroying the Wildberries warehouses people cheered without ever asking themselves what it would do to the nature of the conflict.
Here are examples of Russia destroying Ukrainian warehouses, long before Ukraine started doing the same:
You can certainly dig up isolated incidents for reasons I've already hit on. There have been at least hundreds of thousands of missiles and drones that have launched during this war. Many end up "disabled" in a way that means they're going to end up falling on random locations. Other times there's going to be bad intelligence leading to inappropriate targeting. For instance the US didn't intentionally attack a girls' school in Iran, even with the highly precise double tap on it. It's that it's directly adjacent to a military facility, and used to be part of that facility - the intelligence was stale. In other cases, there's going to be completely valid intelligence that one side or the other lies about. In some instances there have been things like "civilian infrastructure" that was struck with video evidence of clear ongoing secondary detonations following the strike - it was a weapons cache.
And of course you can also find plenty of examples from the Russian side of similar scenarios. Especially in the most hot border regions like Belgorod Ukrainian weapons have hit civilian and even residential structures repeatedly. This is framed as intentional attacks on civilians by Russian propaganda, but it's the exact same as Ukrainian/Western propaganda in that these are going to be overwhelmingly unintentional or 'misguided' attacks rather than actual targeting.
But now after this Pandora's Box has happened you could find hundreds of recent examples of civilian infrastructure being hit in a very short period of time, because it is being intentionally targeted. This kind of gets into an analog of our parallel discussion about civilian deaths. Obviously tens of thousands of civilians have died during this war, and that's a shame. But if civilians weren't being actively avoided, let alone intentionally targeted, then the deaths would be orders of magnitude more. Hopefully this box, at least, remains shut.
>>>For instance when the Iranian school was hit, it was also double tapped.
Now you are talking. The school(existence of which is not possible to prove) was for girls - in Iranian Islam version these girls are seen as cattle and not really a human loss, so what Iranian side is voicing is double faced.
It is a collateral damage - unless you have any proof that it was deliberate, you can only make accusations and not a proof of a warcrime. But far from what you are peddling in the case of Ukrainian/Russian attacks - Russians are systematically attacking civil infrastructure(with occasional hits on military objects, which is rather adding to confusion). I would give Ukrainian pass on killing Russians, but sadly they do not kill them - despite the whole Russian mythology of what they expect from Ukrainians to do and what they justify to their attacks on civilians. Actually Russians are expecting for revenge of what they have done preemptively, as that is how their mindset operates, but nothing to do with laws of war and legal actions and responsibilities for them.
>>>Your logic about what is a valid military target
Not my logic. There are very specific categories what are and what are not legitimate targets. My wording here is not an issue - your understanding of what can be legitimate target is. Look, take step back and actually go through the laws - your morality crusade does not make you better than anyone else, you are just insane. IMO, you are a legal target for deadly force with the lies that you are spreading around, but not really my problem.
>>>People are far too myopic and led by emotion instead of their brain.
If that is not your case, then you are a manipulative bot. It is also laughable to have this argument and exclude yourself.
>>>And you obviously have show flagged on, or you wouldn't be able to reach this point in the discussion.
Yes, I am just interested to seek out crazy delusional people and see how dangerous they can be and what poisonous ideas they are throwing around - apparently poisoned by those ideas themselves, which is rather good indicator of insane people among society. It also makes me question myself if I am slipping into insanity and correct myself, because some parts of my mind would very much like to act like you do and some antidote is needed to keep my multifaceted mind in order, as I am mirroring other people - especially crazy ones too easily. Other option would be to avoid socialization completely, and it works, but then I have to question reality...
Regardless, I think that not all is lost for YC crowd and some of them have proper judgement backed by knowledge, which is surprising to me sometimes.
A quick search shows them striking, or attempting to strike, targets hundreds of miles within Russia at least as far back as early 2023. And they were aiming for energy and military targets, which are going to have vastly more defenses than civilian infrastructure.
> Both sides instead regularly frame it, for propaganda purposes, as being targeted without ever saying as such - 'A [enemy] [drone/missile] struck a beach full of civilians' for instance. That's completely accurate, but misleading because most people think that means the beach was targeted, as opposed to 'we shot down an incoming drone that was headed for a military base and it crashed into a beach'.
Search for "Kherson human safari". Russians are deliberately targeting civilians, this is proven beyond any doubt.
There's a pretty simple way to challenge your assumption here. Here is the Wiki for your example. [1] Apparently a ballpark of 200 civilians were killed there in the years between the war's start and late 2025. So let's assume you're right and Russia genuinely wanted to just go kill civilians in Kherson. It's a city that had a pre-war population of about 280,000.
How many do you think they would have managed to kill? 200 is quite easy to see happening from air defense mishaps, occasional mistargeting, and other such issues - but it's off by orders of magnitude if we assume a targeted campaign against civilians. A campaign against civilians would have multiples of that number per day in such a location.
> How many do you think they would have managed to kill?
They killed 200 and wounded 2,000. This is information from a year ago.
> but it's off by orders of magnitude if we assume a targeted campaign against civilians.
No, it is not. It's not like they are only attacking civilian targets or concentrating all the drones allocated on that section of the front on Kherson city. Also, Ukrainians regularly eliminate such small drones, so only a fraction manages to actually get through and injure/kill someone.
There are many sources linked on that Wikipedia page extensively documenting Russian human safari in Kherson. There are many videos, such as this one:
You're blindly relying on information from a combatant aligned side in the midst of a war which has had an unprecedented degree of 'information warfare' with the claims of one day constantly shown to be lies of tomorrow. You should ignore most of everything except that which is completely falsifiable. Deaths are 'kind of' that. They generally are not going to be made up, but figures are going to be massaged. Civilian deaths will be overestimated, troop deaths will be underestimated.
Videos can be fabricated, misattributed, misleading, or all of the above. But the data is in the deaths. You don't have a substantial intentional targeting of civilians and only 200 civilian deaths over a period of years. It's just complete nonsense. That's an aspirational rate of minimal civilian deaths by the standards of most of any conflict. Kherson is 'hot' and had a population of 280k. Obviously most people left it since the start of the war, but by any measurement that's still a civilian death rate well under 1% in a hot zone, during an active war. That is phenomenal.
And this generalizes. Even given the obviously fabricated military casualty rates for both sides, the civilian casualty rate for Ukraine is the lowest of any major conflict in modern history, by a wide margin. [1]
> You don't have a substantial intentional targeting of civilians and only 200 civilian deaths over a period of years.
You cannot know this unless you also know the number of drones that actually get through the Ukrainian defenses and manage to reach Kherson city, find a target, and attempt an attack.
> Even given the obviously fabricated military casualty rates for both sides, the civilian casualty rate for Ukraine is the lowest of any major conflict in modern history, by a wide margin.
This is fully expected in a modern inter-state (not civil) stalemate war between approximately peer powers, and says nothing about the propensity of any side to attack civilians. It is hard to even get a chance to attack a civilian, unless the attacker first gets through the established military defense. Contrast this with civil wars where the front lines are unclear and fluid, or wars where one side is much more powerful than the other, so civilians of the other side are fully exposed - they generally have much higher civilian casualties.
The civilian casualty rates aren't a raw rate, but a ratio of civilian casualties to military casualties. So you'd be left trying to argue that Russians are good at killing soldiers, but not good at killing civilians, and the whole argument becomes increasingly unreasonable.
The Wiki on the Human Safari page gave a variety of numbers on the number of attacks. They claim around 100 strikes a day, with a peak in excess of 300. Even if you have a 95% interception rate, which you don't, that's 5+ a day getting through. If you actually are aiming for civilians you can also easily hit high population areas with those 5 that get through. Even when just targeting individuals, that'd be 200 in 40 days - and we're speaking of years. And that's also ignoring that the thousands of other disabled drones are crashing in random locations and sometimes detonating, which will also randomly kill civilians on occasion.
> So you'd be left trying to argue that Russians are good at killing soldiers, but not good at killing civilians, and the whole argument becomes increasingly unreasonable.
Yes, Russians are much more likely to kill a soldier than to kill a civilian. This is simply because in Ukraine, civilians tend to be much farther from them compared to Ukrainian soldiers. We have already seen what happens if this condition is not maintained (the destruction of Mariupol, the torture chambers discovered in deoccupied territories).
> Even if you have a 95% interception rate, which you don't, that's 5+ a day getting through.
Why shouldn't they have a 95% interception rate, or even higher? Non fiber optic drones can be taken out by EW, fiber optic ones are shot down by mobile anti-drone crews. And it's not like it's easy to find a civilian target in accessible areas of Kherson. There are not many civilians remaining, and those remaining are all aware of the danger and reside in the western parts, move cautiously, carry drone detectors and hide if a drone is discovered. Ukrainian soldiers have the entire eastern part to intercept the drones with no risk to civilians.
There were 280,000 civs in Kherson. It's now in the 60,000 range. That's a lot, a whole lot, any way you look at it, and all well within the range of drones. The drone interception rate was around 80%, excluding jet powered drones for which it is dramatically lower. For that matter Kherson is within Russian artillery range. They could easily inflict civilian casualties in the thousands in very brief order if they wanted to.
> For that matter Kherson is within Russian artillery range. They could easily inflict civilian casualties in the thousands in very brief order if they wanted to.
I think you are severely overestimating the effectiveness of artillery, if you think Russians could kill thousands in very brief order by using it, especially in warzones where people are aware of the danger. After the first hits, people tend to take cover. It would take an awful lot of shells to kill thousands with artillery (tens of thousands of shells). Then there is the issue of artillery use being risky in this war: Ukrainians have counter-battery radars, the battlefield is monitored by drones, and artillery piece is a very prized target. There is a reason why drones now kill more people in this war than artillery.
You're completely right that drones have overtaken artillery in terms of death, but why? Artillery is cheaper and far deadlier. You can level entire areas with relatively small numbers of artillery shells. See: Bakhmut/Artemovsk where artillery was heavily used for some terrifying imagery. A fortified city turned into something that looks like a scene out of a post nuclear holocaust movie. [1]
The reason is precisely because drones are more effective at killing soldiers, especially mobile soldiers. If you want to go wreck some civilians, point artillery at their residency and you're going to have a mountain of corpses after a few shells. Taking cover will only apply for those well outside the epicenter. Many will be dead before they know they're under attack. Artillery doesn't discriminate and kills anything and everything within a wide area, and in many scenarios that is very undesirable.
You find yourself constantly having to make quite unreasonable arguments if one wants to think that civilians are being intentionally targeted, whereas if you assume the opposite then basically everything suddenly makes 100% sense.
Apart from human safari, there is also issue with hostage situation in Oleshki and thousands of dead by Russians using them for target practices and not allowing them to leave.
I don't think he's concerned at all. He wants to destroy their profitability before they remove his chips from inference. Thats why they are selling billions at scale of chips to China, he needs llms to be commodities. He wants to eliminate any company that can rival him, like any monopolist oligarch.
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